The results reassured New York shoppers. “Good — we don’t need it,” said Trudy, a longtime shopper at the Met Food store in Cobble Hill, where we tested a ground-beef sample. “You don’t want to be paying for one thing and getting another.”

The store’s meat manager, Joe Bandera, grinds the beef himself using only cuts from American cattle.

“You have to know what you’re buying,” he said.

Experts said the encouraging report could be attributed to the halt of horse slaughtering in the United States.

The feds banned the practice in 2007, then lifted restrictions in 2011. But they’ve issued no new licenses to potential slaughterhouses, so no horses are killed here. The sale of horse meat in the United States stopped in 2005.

The lab that did The Post’s tests, EMSL Analytical Inc., in Cinnaminson, NJ, said there was no intentional use of horse meat in the samples and not even trace amounts from accidental cross-contamination. That can happen if a meat plant has changed uses or processing machinery is not cleaned thoroughly between jobs, a source of some tainted products in Ireland and Britain.

“The DNA analysis is so sensitive, it detects very small amounts,” said Todd Napolitano, an EMSL sales rep.

“In Europe, you’re seeing a good degree of cross-contamination and some degree of fraud. We can’t tell what the intention behind it is. Was there a profit motive or prior use of the facility?”